Well, I wasn’t trying to be topical. This happens to be the next in the series of the Softside Adventure of the Month, once again in a game by Peter Kirsch (at least according to the TRS-80 version stored at Ira Goldklang’s site).
Softside, May 1982.
You are the Captain of the Titanic on her maiden voyage. Suddenly a large white object comes into view through the window. Can you avoid the historic collision? If not, can you save the lives of your passengers and crew?
This is most definitely a free-form take on the Titanic, so I’m not going to bother with historical background (I doubt Kirsch did) although I will take the opportunity to link this: What would the odds be of Dua Lipa actually surviving the sinking of the Titanic?, a serious historical examination of this music video:
So let’s dive in!
We’re the captain, and the only one running the vessel. We’re at the wheel and LOOK WINDOW reveals a looming iceberg. Fortunately we can TURN WHEEL:
So, that was a good game, let’s move on to…. oh wait:
(Apparently in Time Zone you can save Caesar from getting stabbed by Brutus and he just slips and dies instead. Oops.)
So, the game now explains you need to try to save as many people as you can and potentially grab some treasures along the way. I made a beeline for a lifeboat and did GO LIFEBOAT:
Great, now that the game is over, we can …
Oh, wait, I should rescue some people? I suppose. I did appreciate the clever schtick here in leaving open the possibility of just running for it. In practical circumstances I expect most players will want to rescue everyone although I could see someone leaving behind one of the more ornery passengers (and there are some!) intentionally.
Incidentally, nobody gets on the lifeboat on their own: on this version of the lifeboat, with a very, very, reduced crew complement and number of passengers, for every single rescue you GET PASSENGER (or whomever) and then GIVE PASSENGER at a lifeboat. There are six lifeboats, and you need to be careful a particular one isn’t full, otherwise it will sink when you add one more.
Orange locations have lifeboats.
I was initially worried about optimization, but this game weirdly has no timer. In fact, you need to wait, as there’s hot soup in one location you need to eat, and in the bottom there’s a key, and the key lets you in a cabin to rescue one of the passengers.
Most of the game involves finding keys in unusual spots and/or getting passengers to move.
For one lady, they are playing music too loud. You need to go downstairs, have a chandelier nearly hit you…
…grab a broken bulb from the chandelier, and use it to cut a wire on a fuse box. This causes the music to get cut off so you can rescue the lady.
If there are no empty seats the response will be “you see nothing special” when you LOOK LIFEBOAT.
One passenger is Chinese and you have to find a Chinese-English dictionary in order to be able to rescue her:
There’s a librarian here you need to rescue too.
The steward is sleeping in his cabin. You need to do the newspaper-under-the-door, poke the keyhole trick to get the key and unlock it. The actual process is PUT NEWSPAPER, SLIDE NEWSPAPER, POKE KEYHOLE, and it took me about eight tries to get the sequence down. Kirsch may have branched into interesting ideas but his parser can still be jank:
One passenger is described as a “naked lady” and has her toe stuck in a drain hole in the tub. You need some margarine from the kitchen to free her.
One woman is too drunk to grab so you need to ask a waiter for COFFEE (the waiter is clearly asking an open-ended question that lets you get any item you want) but surely there’s lots of requests that work for drunkenness? As well as coffee, at least?
The last interesting bit is that there are two possible endings. One you’ve seen already (when you just ditch everyone) but that ending also applies even if you do a complete rescue. You need to send for help to get the alternate ending.
Then once you finally step on a lifeboat after getting everyone else on there will be rescue at the end.
I appreciated that Kirsch was experienced enough to completely mix up his standard operating procedure; here there are a whole bunch of puzzles that can be solved more or less in any order. I didn’t even mention the two treasures, which are purely optional. You can find a diamond ring in a vacuum machine; also, there’s the captain’s own safe at the start where you don’t remember the combination and have to MOVE the safe to find the combination. Not common to have a combo-lock which is your own character’s safe!
I also never quite expected the Titanic to be the setting of more or less a comic romp, like Airplane! on a boat. It’s curious because there are obviously serious moments (you rescue a baby from a crib) but they are flatly given in the same tone as incidents like Mrs. Vanderbilt hiding under a table (“oops, excuse me madame, hiding under the table won’t help”) and bodily picking up the waiter (after he’s dispensed coffee) to toss him into a lifeboat, too.
Renga in Blue 
It is useful that you didn’t abandon the game early on as nine tenths of it seems to be below the water.
“ One passenger is described as a “naked lady” and has her toe stuck in a drain hole in the tub.” — I remember this exact plot from the show Emergency! when I was a kid (70s). Our hero EMTs are called to the scene and comic awkwardness ensues. (It’s a pretty lady in her twenties of course.) IMDb tells me that aired in 74. Guessing the author got the idea from that.
But googling it, I see lady-with-stuck-toe was used in Love American Style as well. That show went off the air in 74.
There is also at least one tv commercial that treats it like a cliché, so maybe it’s an old idea.
I don’t know why it seemed so important to share this info with you. :-)
I think the “original” lady-with-toe-stuck-in-bath scene came from The Dick Van Dyke show, which was considered incredibly salacious at the time (For the sake of propriety, the bathroom lacks a commode, though the existence of such things had been established a few years earlier in Leave it to Beaver)
That was the first thing I thought of, too. When I was being indoctrinated with every piece of Dick Van Dyke Show trivia as a child, I was told that THEY were riffing on a scene from the 1955 movie The Seven Year Itch. (The same film that gave us the famous photo of Marilyn Monroe with her dress being blown up by a draft.) And according to Wikipedia, the movie was adapting a 1952 play.
So it seems this concept was floating around the media subconscious for a few decades in the mid 20th century. To the point that in the early 2000s, iCarly did a joke about how weird it was that it was so common in old movies and TV shows.
Where did the newspaper/keyhole puzzle originate?
In adventure game form? Zork, mainframe original. It feels like it might have shown up in some earlier forms, if anything can think of some.
Ah, cool. Do we know which of the Implementors came up with it?
The Zork II Invisiclues call it an “old trick”, suggesting that it was an established trope, but I don’t know of any examples off the top of my head. (Maybe noir or murder mysteries?)
I remember seeing Tom Baker doing the newspaper/key trick in an episode of Doctor Who back in the seventies. But even that probably wasn’t the first.
It goes back at least to Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series–I mention this in the commentary to my Cragne Manor room (which contains many of the ingredients for this puzzle, but the key isn’t in the lock). I forget where I read this, I can try to find it later.
OK, my source for this was the TV Tropes page for “Paper Key-Retrieval Trick,” which says “Most Enid Blyton series include this at least once, especially The Secret Seven and The Famous Five.” The one I can find it in is “The Mystery of the Secret Room” (1945) from The Five Find-Outers series, p. 28. The hero says “I read it in one of my spy books.”
I’m not sure there’s a definitive source for the newspaper-keyhole trick, but it turns up in books of brainteasers/logic puzzles as early as the ’60s, I think. The trick generally only works with warded mortise locks, which peaked in popularity during the 19th century – in the 18th century, they were “fancy” locks that wouldn’t typically be used on the sort of room where you’d imprison somebody. The cylinder-bored lock was invented in the 1920s and became the more common kind of household lock probably post-war. So I would assume the paper-key-retrieval trick originates in the victorian era, but I’m not sure if it started out as an action sequence in fiction, or if it was a logic puzzle first.
> I think the “original” lady-with-toe-stuck-in-bath scene
> came from The Dick Van Dyke show
Excellent factoid! Thanks Ross!
I am not sure about the Dick Van Dyke Show being the bellwether for this old chestnut. The episode featuring this (Never Bathe on Saturday) was aired on March 31st 1965. The premise had been used by Oldham’s finest Eric Sykes in his eponymous sitcom in an episode first shown on BBC1 (Sykes and a Bath) which was broadcast on January 25th 1961.
I’m so relieved the game made you remember to grab the waiter, too! I was afraid it would treat him as set-dressing.
Okay, it’s a comic romp, but I’m not sure sound amplification in 1912 was developed in enough to “blast” from a bathroom and drown out shouting. And would any playback device have used electricity anyway? My guess is that she had an entire orchestra in the bathroom with her, and the cut wire put the lights out so they couldn’t see the conductor or sheet music.